Ketchup


I watched the ketchup rinse off my plate,

wash down the drain -- more like blood

than the stuff itself --

(the Reagan administration considered ketchup a vegetable)

and left the dish in the sink.

I dried my hands on a damp cloth

and dug out my books to see if anyone

had ever written a poem about

	doing the dishes.

Not spotted wineglasses,

or the good china;  I'm talking

mismatched plastic cups,

wooden bowls for rice,

microwaveable dished crusted with food,

stainless steel pots and greasy frying pans,

floating in an antique white chipped ceramic basin.

The dishes sat in gray, soapy water,

waiting for me to take time to wash it all away.




In the back of _Bartlett's_, water had a page's worth of mention

and dishes got thirteen citations, mostly metaphorical.

I found one poem, a piece by W.H.Auden -- but even he

used a cracked tea cup as a road to something greater,

much more important than the food caught in the drain.

(I have a cereal bowl, Japanese blue, the only dish I always wash

after I finish.  It is beautifully round and smooth --

I don't want it to get chipped by an accident of neglect,

lost amidst the remnants of a spaghettit dinner

and the grimy tupperware.

I enjoy its smoothness, and the blue flower at the bottom,

rediscovered when I drink my milk.)




I do not know where else to look,

there is so much out there now and I am still trying

to learn Cummings and Eliot, Keats and Lowell.

Beauty, Death, Love, Truth, Sanity and God,

and me, sitting at my kitchen table of unsanded two-by-fours,

reading and eating breakfast and finding once again,

the flower at the bottom of the bowl.

			Kelly J. Cooper, 2/12/92
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